Sessions at FOSDEM 2011 on Saturday 5th February

We have come a very long way since the beginning of free software. GNU, Android, Linux, Open Solaris, X, Apache, Perl & other free software have changed & are changing the world.

But events happening now, like the Wikileaks investigation, and technologies of spying and control, like Facebook and iPad, are reminding us just how politically and socially unfree computers can make us if we're not careful. In this talk, I consider where we are now, and where we need to go next.

systemd is a system and session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic.

Wow, what a paragraph! In case I lost you half-way: in our presentation I hope to explain in a lot more detail what systemd is really about, and parse with you the paragraph in a way that is hopefully more understandable.

Both the Fedora and OpenSUSE distributions (and many others, too) are working on making systemd the default init system in their next releases. Since the init system is a core part of the operating system and systemd a major change that will impact what we consider a Linux system quite a bit this talk should be interesting to all developers, administrators and users alike.

When people talk about monitoring generally they are system people talking of hosts and network gear going up and down. That is the monitoring world as most people know it and it must change if we want to write better applications and offer better services.

This talk gives a brief overview of what is SystemTap and its capabilities. We then demonstrate how it can be used to dynamically insert questionable code at any level to spy on users and modify behaviours of applications and system components very easily. This is not about novel techniques or breaking trust boundaries (we assume you are root already). This is only about making things easier for both the good and the bad guys.

The Java ecosystem, long a bastion of stability in an otherwise volatile industry, has been unusually challenged of late.

Roiled by Oracle's litigation of Google, churned with the news that IBM decommited from Harmony in favor of OpenJDK and lately has been under attack from analysts. It many respects, the unrest couldn't have come at a worse time, as developer attention and focus is fragmenting under a constant stream of platform, language and framework fragmentation. What does this mean for free software developers?

We'll explore and unpack the recent events, and evaluate likely scenarios moving forward with an eye towards the implications of Java on the free software community, including the future of Java the language and Java the platform. This will include relevant metrics vis-a-vis developer attention and strategy, as well as an examination of projects important to the ecosystem.